Arooj Aftab was raised in Lahore, Pakistan to a family that loved music and indulged her budding interests. Absorbing the lessons of imported pop, south Asian classical music, and Urdu poetry, she recorded a humble and beautiful acoustic cover of Hallelujah that became a viral hit. After moving to New England to attend the Berklee College of Music, her audio universe suddenly expanded, revealing abstract jazz and modern composition that would allow her to stretch her sense of song and magnificent voice into totally immersive states of being.
She was set to premiere her third album, Vulture Prince, at Big Ears 2020 with a stellar band—harpist Maeve Gilchrist, drummer Greg Fox, guitarist Gyan Riley, and fellow Pakistani-American experimental master Shahzad Ismaily. But then, you know, coronavirus.
For most of the century, Liz Harris has best been known by the name Grouper, an immersive solo project in which she creates orbs of barely flickering sound that lure listeners ever-inward, like moths circling fading porch lights. Through its various sonic permutations, from guitar and voice to piano to sheets of subdued miasmic noise, Grouper has been a liminal project, tottering on the thresholds of ambient music and psychedelia, sound art and songwriting, conjuring and channeling. Like a Rothko painting or an Octavio Paz poem, Grouper’s best work invites you to stare into something that foregoes an easy reading, to find your own emotional path through the frame she has rendered.
That ideal dominates for Harris’ latest moniker, Nivhek. After hearing the name in a dream about a ritual happening above the Arctic Circle, Harris accepted an invitation for an artistic residency in Murmansk, the largest city north of the Circle, high in Russia along the Arctic Ocean. In that bleak setting, Harris coupled her emerging understanding of Ableton software with long-forgotten vocal takes and this sense of far-north calm amid decay. On the project’s debut dual LP, After its own death/Walking in a Spiral Towards the House, she shows her range as a stylistic conjurer, moving from the sound of submerged choirs to industrial throb to slowly twinkling gamelan across 20-minute spans. It is fascinatingly nonlinear music, with little incidents of mesmerizing or terrifying sound inviting you to step back and piece together some bigger picture, like trying to rebuild a cloud after the rain has fallen from it.
After initially considering Nivhek an isolated recording project, Harris was scheduled to bring the idea to Big Ears 2020 for a rare performance, but then coronavirus.
For fans of Roger & Brian Eno, Noveller, Julianna Barwick, and Harold Budd.
"Brian Eno and Chilvers have worked together on videos for the album Mixing Colours that distil the album’s essence, marrying the simplicity and contemplative qualities of its soundscapes with suitably uncomplicated, mesmerising imagery of slowly-changing, dreamlike panoramas. Whether or not these settings are familiar, their impressionistic character lends them an enigmatic anonymity, encouraging the mind to wander into worlds both real and imagined. 'The more you listen to this,' says Roger, 'particularly with the fabulous worlds that Brian has created, you can really walk into this enormous landscape and stay.'
For fans of Noveller, Julianna Barwick, Grouper, and Harold Budd.
Sarah Lipstate has been performing as Noveller for at least a decade now, probably longer - we first saw her opening for Xiu Xiu at The Drunken Unicorn back in 2010. We saw her open for St. Vincent once, but we can't remember which tour or where.
She's a solo performer, creating rich tapestries of sound with only her electric guitar and an arsenal of effect pedals, most notably a loop repeater. A new single, Effektology, was just released yesterday, Friday the 13th of March 2020.
For fans of Julianna Barwick, Grouper, Brian Eno and Frippertronics.
Holger Czukay (1938-2017), a founding member of the German band Can, studied music under Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1963 to 1966. Initially, Czukay had little interest in rock music but changed his mind after he heard the Beatles' I Am the Walrus, which opened his mind and ears to music by rock experimentalists such as The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa.
Czukay was notable for producing early recordings of ambient music, for having explored "world music" long before the term was coined, and for being a pioneer of sampling.
In 1969, he released the album Canaxis with Rolf Dammers as a side project from Can. The album is sometimes credited to the "Technical Space Composer's Crew." Side A, Boat-Woman-Song, consisted entirely of highly manipulated samples of music from around the world looped through a tape recorder. The album preceded Brian Eno's ambient experiments by at least a decade and stands as a singular, visionary statement of musical possibilities.
Listening to this album 51 years after it was released (52 years after it was recorded), I hear similarities not only to Eno, but also Jon Hassell, William Basinski, and Swans.
Stars of the Lid is an American ambient music duo formed in Austin in 1993 and consisting of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie. Among the influences they cite are minimalist and electronic composers such as Arvo Pärt, Zbigniew Preisner, Gavin Bryars, and Henryk Górecki, as well as the band Talk Talk and post-rock artists Labradford,
Their compositions are largely beatless soundscapes, composed of droning, effects-treated guitars along with piano, strings, and horns. Volume swells and feedback fill the gap of rhythmic instruments, providing dynamic movement. Their sound has been described as "divine, classical drone without the tedious intrusion of drums or vocals."
Virginia (20.03) is off of their 2007 release, Carte-de-Visite, a compilation of outtakes and other unreleased material recorded between 1997 and 2007.
If you like this kind of music, check out any of the similar artists listed above, or simply scroll down to last Sunday's post and listen to Brian and Roger Eno's Celeste, or almost anything by either of the Eno brothers.
Also, Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie has also been involved in a side project with composer Dustin O'Halloran called A Winged Victory for the Sullen. AWVFTS will be performing Sunday, March 29, in Knoxville, Tennessee at the 2020 edition of the Big Ears festival.
Ambient music pioneer Brian Eno and his brother Roger have worked together over the years (1983's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks with Daniel Lanois and its follow-up effort, For All Mankind), and according to Roger, “There’s a huge commonality between what we’re interested in,” although the two have never before produced an album together as a duo. But on March 20, they are releasing their first joint collaboration, Mixing Colours.
The album reportedly represents a a 15-year effort, and each of the 18 tracks is titled after a different color. According to Brian, “These pieces are very impressionistic and very much to do with sonic quality, sonic colour.” The first track released, Celeste, sounds very much in keeping with Brian's previous work with composer Harold Budd.
